JoshSweeney

Be A Confirmation Emailer

The Confirmation Email is likely one of the most important and least spoken about rules of email etiquette. Over time I have learned that people who send Confirmation Emails are some of the most easy people to work or do business with.

It is a simple process but enhances the relationship in multiple ways. Here is how it works.

No matter what kind of email you are sent you send some sort of confirmation telling the sender that you are on top of things. This keeps the sender from wondering whether you received it, whether it went into a spam box or if they are just ignoring you. Lets look at a few scenarios that I have seen this be extremely helpful in.

1. The Invoice – You send someone and invoice. Without the confirmation email you basically hope that they received it, processed it and that you are going to have a check show up before the Net period is over. More than likely, if this person is not a Confirmation Emailer your check will be late.

The confirmation emailer receives an invoice and responds as follows. “I have submitted this for payment” ( Actual customer response ). Now you know that they received it, there wasn’t an issue with the invoice or amount and that the invoice is being processed. This response shows a healthy responsive relationship and you will return the favor with prompt responses in the future.

2. The Task – You request that someone complete a task. Without the confirmation email you don’t know if the task was received or even if it will get completed.

The confirmation emailer will reply with “I’m on it” ( Actual confirmation response ). Again, you know that it was received and is being taken care of.

The great thing about the confirmation email is that it can be short and sweet but still lets people know that you are on top of things. We all get busy and overwhelmed but should strive to be Confirmation Emailers. Our stress levels, lives and relationships will all be better because of the Confirmation Email.

Jeff Jarvis and The Link Economy Opened My Eyes

Have you ever noticed how when you buy a new car you suddenly seen them everywhere? Almost as if the act of buying the car opened your eyes to see the masses of other commuters who had that car.

Today I finished Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do in audiobook format? This isn’t a revue of the book, there a plenty on Amazon, but an account on how the book opened my eyes. Like buying the car and seeing them everywhere, I listened to an audiobook and suddenly saw breakdowns in the system.

Jarvis talks about the link economy and the effects of linking data across sites and content. He also explains the profound impact of the link economy and peoples ability to quickly find data and learn from that data. A few short hours after the completion of the book I was researching data for CRMStage.com in relation to the GetSocial Twitter Pro module and realized a breakdown of the link economy.

The breakdown was that many article writers and large technology sites had created news and content mentioning the hard work done by my team but not linking to that work. I don’t want to come across as whining but would like to highlight the fact that many entrepreneurs  and small businesses could be massively impacted in a positive way if credit was given. Credit, being a link.

Take a look at this example:

Inc.com writer John Brandon wrote an article How to Track Customers with CRM Tools which mentions a Twitter addon for SugarCRM, the addon which my team wrote. In this article he mentions the module, Twitter, SugarCRM and Zoho yet links to none.

So I pose these questions:

• How would links from such a popular site change the economy?
• How would links they provide promote business growth past there advertisers?
• How would it effect their business?

If I had not read What Would Google Do? I would not have realized the scale and impact of not having links in articles on these popular sites. The links that these articles are leaving out make it harder for readers to follow the path to knowledge. On a large scale the lack of links are impacting the economy. No links means data is harder to find which impacts purchasing. I am sure with enough time hundreds of other impacts could be brought forth.

In the end I want to thank Jarvis for a great book and for making me see how much of an impact the link has.

Tips to Start Screencating: The Time Commitment

In the last Tips to Start Screencasting post we went over the software and hardware that is required to record a screencast. This time we are going to outline the time commitment.

Preparation:

1. Write a script – Once you have decided on the topic that you will be covering I suggest that you write a script which outlines what you are going to say. You will also want to read through that script to determine about how long it will take. The reason that I find this important is because each time you mess up during the recording it will add to the editing time.  It also gives you an idea on the length of the video which is important depending on where the video is posted, the topic and the audience.

2. Prep the demo – Preparing the environment and doing a soft run through before recording will ensure that everything is in place before you hit the record button. If something is out of place during the recording it will either slow you down or cost you time in editing.

Recording:

Reading a script, clicking and making it all seem like a natural demo without messing up is a difficult task. I have heard of two ways that people go about recording.

1. Record all together – Recording the sound and screen while speaking and clicking is a lot of work and must feel natural to be professional quality. This is very difficult to do but can be done with practice.

2. Record separately – I have spoken to individual that record sound and the screen separately which I have also tried. The problem that I run into with this is keeping everything in sync.

At this time I have not settled on the best approach but continue to research.

Editting: Celia Dyer once told me that your can expect 1 minute of editing for every minute of recording. At first this sounded a little high but after recording and editing a few of my own videos I find this to be an accurate expectation. I have also found that proper preparation up front can save you large amounts of editing time.

One example is with setting the intended length of the video. If you record a video that is 20 minutes long and you need it to be ten then you can expect a significantly higher amount of editing time and the 1 for 1 rule gets blown out of the water.

Publishing:

1. Format – The format of the video will be dictated by where the video is being published. Before you start recording you will want to determine the screen resolution and other playback criteria and change your settings accordingly.

2. Publishing the final -The one item that I always see left out when people talk about the time to produce a screencast is the time it takes to process and publish. Once the video has completed editing it has to processed and converted into the appropriate format. the time for this varies depending on the video length, quality and speed of the system.

After the video is process and formatted it has to be published. You could always just log in to YouTube or TubeMogul and publish in minutes but that doesn’t take into account SEO or searchablility. Taking the time to pick a keyword rich title, description and tags could enhance the traffic for your video.

As always, we hope this is helpful information and would enjoy seeing your screencasts. If you decide to create them after reading this short series then please let us know and provide a link.

Tags: camtasia, screencasting, video

Tips To Start Screencasting: Software and Equipment

Over the past few weeks I have determined that most people really don’t understand the amount of effort that goes into creating a quality screencast. I believe this statement to be accurate for multiple reasons.

1. I have had people ask me to create screencasts in “my spare time” as if it is something that can be quickly executed. This also assumes that I actually have spare time.

2. In discussing the creation of screencasts with the people requesting them of me, I have been told things like “We tried it and it is easy, just hit record and tell the user how to do something.” If it was that easy then they would have recorded their own already and not be asking me to do it.

3. When I decided to start recording screencasts I really didn’t understand all the aspects that made up and went into recording.

Recording a quality screencast takes time, practice, the right equipment and a quiet space with no echo. This isn’t to say that it can’t be done on a budget or in a less than optimal space, because it can, but it does need to me more planned than one might anticipate.

When it comes to software and equipment you want to be cost conscious but not cheap. The things that you can’t do without is recording software, a microphone and, of course, a computer.

Software:
There are plenty of options for recording software and the one thing that I have found to be true is that free will cost you more. Although I had heard of Camtasia and even played with the trial the first thing that I did was download multiple free screencasting software packages to determine if I could get by with them. This was the right thing to do in order to be cost conscious but after much usage and analysis I knew that I was going to have to pay for software.

If anyone came to me now and asked about recording software I would tell them to save days or weeks off of their lives and just go buy some good software to record with. In the end I purchased Camtasia and haven’t looked back.

Equipment:

• Computer – Without getting deep into system specs, it is safe to say that you need a fast computer. Recording and editing video is a resource hog which can quickly decimate netbooks, cheap processors and old hardware. I would recommend no less than 3 GB RAM and a peppy processor. Stay away from Celeron type low budget processing.

• Microphone – Starting out I used a $10 mic which did the job as long as I was in a very quiet room. After letting Loren Norman, an avid screencaster, check our my first works I decided to upgrade. The one thing that he pointed out was the background noises and feedback that happened with a cheap mic. Norman enlightened me to the finer points of having a good microphone and upon his recommendation I went with the Blue Snowball.

Doing the research ahead of time and getting the right software and equipment will make life much less complicated when you start to record your first screencast. Keep a look out for my next post which will outline the time cost to record a screencast.

Tags: camtasia, screencasting, video

Marketing An Inexpensive SugarCRM Module

SugarCRM is a great platform to extend with custom modules. You can extend it into various areas of work and add functionality that the creators never thought of when SugarCRM was coming into existence. These modules are great for personal and company use but things get a little more complex when you decide to sell one.

This week ALT-Invest completed and released it’s first purchasable module for SugarCRM called GetSocial Twitter Pro. The fact that we weren’t some large corporation trying to drive users to our service and simply offered an inexpensive SugarCRM interface to Twitter meant that we were embarking on a journey that not many have taken.

What do I mean by this? SugarCRM offers the SugarForge for developers that want to post their work for all to use at no cost. We have posted multiple modules here but decided that to provide a robust module that was feature rich, we would need a little bit of compensation. This drove us to look at SugarExchange.

Somewhere between mid development and completion we looked at adding the module to the SugarExchange and found that there is a $2000 annual listing fee. This was just not feasible for a module that cost $25 and connected a free service ( Twitter ) to a community that mostly utilizes the free version of SugarCRM. Later we were told that SugarExchange was for corporate modules which, again, means companies that want to drive users to their software or service by offering a module. This seems like an odd positioning given SugarCRM market but that is for another day.

Now that we knew that the two biggest channels for attracting SugarCRM users weren’t going to work for us we had to get more grass roots than originally planned.

Here is what we have done so far:

Seeing that this is a Twitter module and we are Twitter users we started to leverage….. you guessed it, Twitter. There are many helpful SugarCRM users on Twitter so we started by posting screenshots to the new module which thanks to a few got retweeted. We will continue the Twitter effort over a period of time while trying to keep it from getting to spammy. Since we already posted the screenshots we are likely to follow up with posting the docs and then some more info. I think that three Tweets is enough when it comes to marketing one product on Twitter.

Next we hit up the bloggers. We searched out bloggers that used Twitter and SugarCRM that would be willing to review the module. Our offer to them was a free copy with no stipulations. One thing that we also made sure NOT to do was ask for a good review or anything like that. We simply asked for a review of a 1.0 module. Hopefully they enjoy it enough to give us a fair review that is accurate and provides value to potential customers. If they dislike it then at least we still get honest feedback that we can feed off of for the next release.

The third thing that we have done is created a press release to email out to any CRM sites that we identify to be valuable. We just finished the writing the release and will keep you posted on this process.

Since ALT-Invest is one of the organizers of the Atlanta SugarCRM meetup we will be giving a presentation dubbed: Building SugarCRM Modules for Fun and Profit. This will revue everything that we learned in the process of building a module with the intent to sell. In the presentation we  will mention the GetSocial Twitter Pro module as the case in point but will not go more in depth. Doing this will let people know it exists while still staying true to the focus of the group.

Lastly, we have to count personal and company blog posts such as this.

So far, this is were we stand on marketing our inexpensive SugarCRM module. As we further our efforts and make progress we will let you know so that you can know what to do or what not to do with your next module. If you have any suggestions then please leave comments or catch me on Twitter @JoshSweeney.

March Atlanta PHP Meetup Recap

Speaker of the Month

This months meeting centered around Jonathan Freeman’s Model Baker Product. Model Baker is a Mac OSX product that enables a user to rapidly build fields and relationships that will be used on a new web application. Once they build the fields and relationships they can deploy the application which will automatically create the MVC portions of the application. Here is a blurb from the Model Baker website which provides a little more information.

“ModelBaker – a remarkable application that delivers point and click development so you can do amazing things for your business, your customers, organization and school. Rapidly build a corporate intranet from scratch. Create custom client web applications based on templates you’ve created. Place your classroom online and offer your students mobile access from an iPhone, iPod touch or Google Android. “

As you can see it also has the ability to deploy views that work on the iPhone, iPod, or Android. These views are options that are set with the click of a checkbox.

The ModelBaker client is a Mac only client the is written in Objective C. The deployment and creation of the application is accomplished using the CakePHP and EXT JS frameworks. The current version does full server side validation but only stubs out code for client side validation. Jonathan mentioned that full client side validation is on the way.

Another upcoming feature that was discussed was the ability to take and existing database and create the MVC application around it. I have seen a few applications that do this but most were prototypes that were not ready for production use.

To complete the meeting, Jonathan generously supplied all attendees with a free license to the ModelBaker package. If you would like to get a demo or read more about ModelBaker you can head over to WidgetPress.

More Meetup Information

At this months Meetup we did something a little different with part of the time. Even though we were near record attendance we went around the room and had everyone introduce themselves, tell us what they did, and what future topics they would like to have presented. Although it takes a while to get around the room it was enjoyable to find out what each persons job and interests were. This way if you needed some assistance or wanted to organize a group around a specific topic then you could quickly identify who to speak with.

With each Meetup we also go over local events, new, and upcoming conferences.

News:

Zend Server CE Released

The PHP consulting company launched – thephp.cc

PHP 5.2.9 Released

Zend Server Beta released

The PHP QA book is in the works – qualityassuranceinphpprojects.com

Ibuilding launched TechPortal – techportal.ibuildings.com

Conferences happening now that you can follow

PHP Quebec

Twitter Hash: #phpquebec

Web: http://cond.phpquebec.com

DrupalCon DC dc2009

Twitter Hash: #drupalcon

Web: http://drupalcon.org

Upcoming Conferences

PHPtek – tek.mtacon.com -Chicago

International php conferences – Berlin

DC PHP – dcphp.com – Washington DC

Dutch PHP – phpconference.nl

OSCON en.oreilly.com/oscon2009

EXT JS – Orlando

Upcoming PHP related events are also tracked on the PHP Community Calendar http://calendar.phpcommunity.org

Local Happenings

A new Atlanta Javascript Meetup has been organized.

Asterisk Install Day

Atlanta PHP Specific

Atlanta PHP recently became an LLC and as is looking to rebrand. The goal is to raise $300 and host a contest on 99designs to get a new logo.

The group is also looking to host a PHP Day which will be a day long seminar all about PHP. If you are interested then please let the organizers know so that there is a better change of making that happen.

Atlanta PHP is planning on putting together an event to support the PHP QA test fest. For more information on test fest visit TestFest 09

The new Atlanta PHP wiki is up and awaiting your entries.

You can follow Atlanta PHP happenings and updates on Twitter: @AtlantaPHP

SugarCRM: Project Management vs Advanced Project Management

If  you are interested in the project management functionality of SugarCRM, the first question that you may have when comparing versions is “what is the difference between project management and advanced project management?”

If you are not familiar with the comparison chart, SugarCRM Community Edition shows project management but Professional and Enterprise offers Advanced Project Management. The comparison chart is usually where the “whats the difference” question originates from.

The Community Edition offers the ability to create Projects, Project Tasks, and relate information to the project records as seen in the partial below.

Creating projects and the tasks assigned to them is a helpful feature but this could be easily built with Module Builder. It is only when modules go beyond the functionality of what could be done with Module Builder do they become the most useful. The same applies for the project management module hence advanced project management.

Advanced Project Management offers multiple pieces of additional functionality which includes resource management, project templates, Gantt charts, a project dashboard, project holidays, and the ability to export to MS Project.

Project Management Comparison Chart:

Resource management gives project owners the ability to assign users and contacts to projects. These users and contacts will then be used in the Gantt charts for the visualization of a project.

Resources Sub-Panel

Project Templates are most useful for companies that do similar projects on a reoccurring basis. With templates, a user can add all of the common tasks that are required for reoccurring project types in order to speed up the build out of the next project.

Of all of the extra features in Advanced Project Management, Gantt charts are considered one of the most useful to many users. Especially for those who are MS Project users.

As you may be able tell from the example chart above, the Gantt functionality closely follows that of the most common functions used in MS Project. Chart creators can assign resources ( users and contacts ), set predecessors, and analyze estimated duration vs actual duration which is very handy for analyzing estimation accuracy and progress. With the ability to create charts it is only natural that SugarCRM give you the ability to export to MS Project.

The last added feature in Advanced Project Management is Project Holidays. Project Holidays blocks out dates on a per user basis so that the project time lines are accurate and adjust for any possible deviations.

Holidays Subpanel

Holiday Scheduling Form

Learn More:

Project Management section of the documentation

Sugar best practices for Project Management recorded seminar

If you have more questions about Project Management then please feel free to contact me or post a comment.

SugarCRM: Import Wizard Tips

In this SugarCRM post I will discuss some tips on importing data into SugarCRM using the import wizard.

To start off with I would like to review what the import wizard is intended for. Even though the import wizard can import mass amounts of data, it’s intended use is to allow users to easily import data from various outlets such as trade shows, event attendance lists, and other exports that get appended to the current record set.

Tip 1: Database Migrations

As of SugarCRM 5.1 the import wizard is robust enough to import tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of records from a database dump. For an accounts migration starting point the import wizard will do the job. The problem comes when you want to maintain relationships during the migration.

When you are migrating data, each system relates records using different keys or formats in the database. SugarCRM is Accounts driven and relates using unique ids. This means that Accounts will go in smoothly but to import a related record, like a related Contact, you will have to get the contacts related account name and the SugarCRM Account id, merge the id in to the contact information and then import. This process is best left to tools like Talend and not the import wizard.

Tip 2: CSV Files

Most people use the comma separated values ( CSV ) format to import data. CSV does the job well but there are things that you need to check for before you import. The first is commas. Since you are importing using CSV, any time that the import wizard ( or Excel ) sees a comma is will think that it is working with the next column of data. This will completely throw off your imports. To fix this you will need to cleanse the data of commas before you import. You can usually substitute with a space or a dash depending on the data. The other alternative is to use another format for importing such as tab delimited since most dumps don’t have tabs in the data, but it is still something to watch out for.

The same thing that goes for commas goes for the the field qualifier. If each entry is wrapped in single quotes and the data fields have single quotes ( Ex: Janes’s Store ) then your data could get imported incorrectly.

Tip 3: Field Qualification and Saving Templates

Fields in CSV files are usually wrapped in quotes, double quotes, or are not wrapped leaving just the comma separators. When you are building the import mapping you are asked to choose which field qualification to use. My tip is to add which type you use in the naming of the template. The reason is that in SugarCRM’s current implementation if you import data using a template with the quotes field qualification and the data actually uses double quotes then the mapping will be blank. This isn’t a problem with a one time import or when the same person does the import the same way each time, but this is not always the case. You may receive weekly exports of the same type of data but from different people with different version of MS Excel/Open Office Calc causing different field qualifiers.

Tip 4: Drop Downs

All drop down boxes added in  Studio need to have a NULL entry as the first option. This is where you click the add button in the drop down editor with no data in the fields. The reason is that when you import data you have to specify a default value for fields that are not filled in. If you don’t have a NULL entry as an option then the import wizard will automatically assign the first value in the list even though the data for that column may not exist.

Tip 5: Matching Data for fields

If you are importing data that requires custom fields or custom values, then each of the custom fields/values needs to exactly match the data being imported. Let look at an example:

DropDown Example

Your data has field/column called Manager Level and the fields are filled in with three options which are Manager, Middle Manager, and Senior Manager.

In SugarCRM you have drop down box that has Manager and Senior Manager.

When you import the data you will get an error for every record that has Middle Manager as a value since it is not in the SugarCRM drop down. For data accuracy reasons SugarCRM is not going to automatically add that as a drop down item.

Hopefully these tips will help you the next time you import data into SugarCRM. If you run into any others that need to be added to the list then feel free to comment or send me an email.

Tags: crm, import wizard, SugarCRM, sugarcrm import

BarCamp Atlanta 2 – Morning of Day Two

Day Two started off a little slow mainly because people that didn’t camp had to drive in to join the crowd. Those who did camp, including myself, stayed up until 4am discussing various topics of interests. Thankfully we have good sponsors in Atlanta who have provided food for the entire event. Breakfast from Flying Biscuit assisted in getting everyone moving and prepared for another day of talks and demonstrations.

The first presentation that I attended on day two was RSS tips, tricks and discussion with Will Powell. One trend that many people at the table were seeing was that they spent less time reading blog posts and more time watching Twitter since it is a real time update and less time consuming from a dedicated reading perspective. Some other take aways were that nobody in the room pays for a RSS readers and from a user level nobody really cares if you are using Atom or RSS for feeds.

After the RSS discussion I sat in on Rachel K’s presentation of Squidoo. From her presentation I would describe Squidoo as a web page building platform that has built in widgets for functionality and also provides monetization. Squidoo uses a shared revenue system and distributes the cash based on the popularity of your lens ( page ).

Sanjay Parekh gave the next presentation on How I built StartupGossip.com in a weekend ( using Yahoo Pipes ). For those of you that aren’t familiar with Sanjays site, it compiles startup blog posts, news, and tweets that are focused on the Atlanta startup scene. Unbeknown to me there is the capability to get Tweets that are geolocation based. Users of the Twitter API can also set a range and get tweets from people within the vicinity. This is what Sanjay used for the Twitter section of StartupGossip.com. The other sections use a compilation of data that is gathered and filtered using Yahoo Pipes. Then the new Pipes streams is fed into StartupGossip.

After Sanjays presentation I visited Greg Tuve which was presenting on memory fractals. Since I had never heard of memory fractals I thought that I should find out just what he was talking about. what the presentation ultimately boiled down to was a highly efficient study technique. By giving the brain three different words or images it would instantly trigger a forth word or piece of information. One example was as follows. Here are three words: lime, salt, Mexico. Now say the forth word that is linked to all three. For most the answer is tequila. Greg uses a program called Memory Weaver which allows people to quickly create study grids. During the presentation Greg also provided explainations down to the neuron level. To get more in depth information you can visit Gregs website: Memory Genesis.

For Lance Weatherby’s second act of the weekend he presented Everything Twitter. Below I have listed some information that Lance gathered and presented.

Reasons to use Twitter:

• Stay in the loop.
• Learning
• Connections
• You are bored in board meetings.

Top Twitter Tools:

• TweetDeck
• Thwirl
• Twitteriffic
• Twitterfom
• Twittercelerator

Useful Twitter Sites:

• Summize
• Favrd

What makes you unfollow people?

• Bad Signal to noise ratio

Tips for Newbs:

• Follow people in your industry
• Do not automatically reciprocate people who follow you
• Find a good client

Another interesting thought was to follow your competitor. I have seen people who follow the Twitter accounts of their competitors but the extra step which was mentioned here was to actually follow individual people in the competitors company. It would be interesting to do a study of this and determine what kind of insights that one could gain.

Next, Brad Gilbreath presented on Location Based Services. Being a Dash user Brad has created addons that allow a new level of interaction with your GPS. One of his examples was a site that integrated with your GPS to list all of the haunted houses in the area that was updated real time. So if you wanted to go out for Holloween and hit every haunted house you could quickly and easily pull this into your GPS. The discussion also went over some potential abuses for a GPS that gets real time data from web services. For example: if you wanted the closest gourmet coffee shop, a service could provide a coffee shop that they were being paid to direct people to.

The last speech of the morning was from our sponsor representative. Glen Gordon is a locally based Microsoft evangelist that always knows the latest happenings coming out of Redmond. He went over the various pieces of recent Microsoft news which is listed below.

• The release of ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight 2
• Microsofts adoption of JQuery
• IE8
• XNA Framework for Zune and Xbox 360

After asking about the innovations in IE8 it quickly turned into an IE8 Q and A session. One of the cool new features in IE8 is web slicing. You can pick out a portion of a website, create a slice, and every time that particular portion of the website is updated you get an indicator in the browser. From the description it is almost and instant RSS feed for a specific section of a website. Glen also told us that IE8 is packaged in a VM for anyone that wants to try it out. To top of the final meeting of the morning Glen offered free one year subscriptions to anyone interested in joining the XNA Dev Network.

After Glens speech we went off to have pizza and drinks provided by the sponsors. This would be out last meal at BarCamp until next year.

Tags: atlanta, barcamp, ie8, microsoft

Bugs vs. Features, A Holy War

For anyone who has worked in a software company the bugs vs. features debate is one for the record books. There are always two sides, one that wants more bugs fixed than features added and one that wants the opposite. Both of which are compassionate about the reasons that their views are correct and the others are not. In the end, each side gets a little of what they want and each side feels like they are getting the short end of the stick.

To fully understand this argument lets take a look at both sides of the argument and the factors that come into play. Below I have listed a few arguments from each side. This is in no way a comprehensive list so if you have more suggestions then please comment.

The Bug Squashers:

1. Bugs are costing us deals.

2. The product is unstable which makes us look bad.

3. Bugs expose an underlying engineering issue.

4. More features means more bugs.

The Feature Zealots:

1. Features are costing us deals.

2. We have to weigh time to market.

3. Customer X wants it.

4. We promised it to get the deal.

As you can see, like any holy war each side has valid arguments as to why they are right or, in this case, why they should utilize more engineering time than the other. Fortunately with this war there are solutions to the problem.

Even though we see what the issue is I still don’t beleive that we have gotten to the core. The core reason that people arugue for one or the other because they don’t have the data. Each side sees things one way and thinks that the product manager just doesn’t understand.

If each side was given quantifiable data to backup the decisions made by product management then at least all parties would understand why the decision was made. Everyone who was feeling wronged would now know that the product manager analyzed quantifiable data and came up with a features to bugs ratio that determined the allotted hours spent for each in a span of time.

If you are a product manager you may be saying “why do I have to justify my decision to you.” The answer is that you don’t. However, for coworkers to really believe in your decisions they need to be able to see justification for the for the outline laid before them. The fact that there is quantifiable data backing up the decision makes it where coworkers no longer feel that bug to feature ratios are simply pulled out of the air or are related to to the most angry customer of the day.

Now that we have looked at one of if not the true cause of the issue we need to determine how to quantify the data. For every software company this approach will be different. I will give an outline on a possible solution using one of the common arguments above.

1. Bug or Feature costs us the deal – This is perhaps the most quantifiable argument. By having salespeople utilizing a CRM system or other tracking system, management can impose required fields. I dub these the “Why did we lose the deal fields.” Each of these will be mandatory if a deal is moved to a loss status. Some examples are as follows:

a. Lossed Because: Bug, Feature, Price, etc..

b. If a bug or feature is chosen then which bug or feature. This would need to be a drop down will all product sections or top X number of features requested.

With information about why each deal was lossed and what the sales person sees as the reason, we can now start to quantify the information. We can now run reports on losses and generate a bug to feature ratio. This is quite simplistic but gets us started. In addition to the hard numbers we can factor in the amount lossed on the opportunity/deal. This step will take a more effort mainly because if hinges on the fact that the opportunity numbers are not inflated.

This in no way is a comprehensive solution but gets us on the road to quantifying why we make the decisions that we make.

There is a good number of books that discuss the benefits of quantificaiton and give compelling reasons on why it makes people more satisfied with decisions and companies more profitable. I have personally read Competing on Analytics which also references Moneyball. Information form both of these books is highly recommended when adding in the trials of running or working in a company.

I will end this post with a quote from Lord Kelvin that I beleive should be on the office wall of all decision makers.

“If you can measure that of which you speak, and can express it by a number, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, 1824-1907)

Tags: bugs, features, product management